Brink’s End Book Two

By Odette C. Bell

Harvey and Rae are pulled closer to hell. But they still have each other.
For now.
Rae has a secret she can’t fathom, and Harvey will have to fight whole worlds to keep her safe. But he can’t fight Tatiana on a vendetta. The ex-Guardian has a point to prove – with his life.
As Frost and Morpheus are swept up in their own tale, new players join the game. But it may not matter in the end.
For this time the Underside will not lose again.
...
Brink’s End follows a cold-hearted mech-pilot and a mysterious alien fighting to stop an ancient enemy from rising. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Brink’s End Book Two today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Brink’s End is the 4th Supreme Outer Guardian series. A massive, exciting, and heroic sci-fi world where the day is always saved and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215866535

Book preview

Chapter 1

Kathleen

The thing that she’d feared for so long was finally coming to pass. Was it the destruction of the Supreme Outer Guardians? Was it the fact the station had clearly been destroyed and she was now on her own? Kind of. The thing she feared more than anything else was being stuck with Mattias. When there were no rules. When he could go back to what he was, what he’d always been, what he’d convinced Frost and the other Guardians he’d left behind him.

What was that saying? A leopard can’t change its spots? A psychic can never change their ways. Once a brutal murderer, always a brutal murderer.

They didn’t speak. What was the point? To converse, they had to trust one another’s opinions.

And that word, trust, hung between them like a hook. A particularly bloody one, because who knows how many people he’d killed on that hook over the years? Consummate manipulators like him knew exactly how to draw you in, tell you what you wanted to hear, and kill you with their lies.

She wasn’t going to fall for that trick. She wasn’t going to fall, full stop.

An edgy silence filled the bridge. Not that you could call it much of a bridge. It was just a two-person cockpit. There was space for the two flight seats and the multifunctional viewscreen at the front. What did it show? Space. Cold, dark, alone. And God knows where it was located among the universes.

In order to escape, Mattias had programmed the computer to pick a destination, some completely random universe out there, and he’d sent the ship to it.

In the unlikely event that the Zarpacs had been tracking the ship, it meant it would be much harder for them to follow.

And as the seconds passed into minutes, as the aching silence turned into something rawer, something a lot more insistent, she finally realized they’d done it. They’d escaped. For now. Or at least they’d escaped that threat. Another one was looming just there right in front of her face like someone with a bloody dagger pressed up against her neck just looking for the right opportunity to slide forward and slit her throat.

She sat to the side of Mattias. She’d peeled herself back from him after they’d transported, pushed half a meter to the left, and crumpled into the navigation seat. And now it meant that the silence could seep into her very bones. It could undermine her and rob her of her balance but still not kill her. The man behind the edgy silence could, and as she slid her wary gaze over to him, her brows compacting hard over her narrow eyes, she waited for the moment he would attack.

But Mattias didn’t attack yet. He appeared to be trapped in his own world. The world of a brutal psychic.

Who knew what kind of plans he was running through in his mind, but not one of them would be kind, and every single one of them would involve defeating her in the bloodiest way possible.

We can’t continue like this, Mattias tried. His voice twanged with pressure.

Continue? We don’t even know where we are. We don’t even know what happened to the stations—

Precisely, he said, voice hard as if that was a rebuke.

Really? Was he about to pretend that he was just here to help the Guardians? That he’d somehow left his brutal past behind? That she should just relax and trust him?

How nice would it be for him if he’d done that.

But Kathleen knew the answer, even if he’d never appreciate it. Mattias couldn’t leave the past behind, couldn’t outgrow what he’d done, because she would never let him.

Rather than reply to his statement, she arched one eyebrow. She looked at him as if she was looking down the barrel of a gun. She’d done that, done that to psychic bastards just like him too many times to count.

She’d been a marksman on her world, though she supposed a better word for it would be an assassin.

That sounded dirty, though, as if she’d gone out to hand out as much death as she could, as if it hadn’t been justified. In reality she’d been a freedom fighter, and she and her kind had been the only reason her planet hadn’t sunk further under the control of the Bureau.

She couldn’t help it, and her gaze flashed down to the right side of Mattias’s chest.

His Supreme Outer Guardian symbol was on the left side, but back when he’d worked for the Bureau, his badge had sat proudly on the right side.

He drummed his fingers.

He looked not at her, but just past her.

Apparently, really good psychics could predict what you were about to do. Something to do with the energy building in your nervous system. They could use it to ascertain your next move.

Then they could get there first.

And if they really wanted to, they could kill you preemptively. And guess what? They really wanted to. She’d never met a Bureau psychic who didn’t kill first, then excused his actions later.

Look, Kathleen—

She flattened a hand on the console in front of her, with every intention to rise to her feet, to finally do what she should have done the second she realized Mattias, the brutal psychic, had become a Supreme Outer Guardian.

How could a man like him guard anything?

He couldn’t.

But a man like him could die—

Something struck the side of the ship.

Its alarms went haywire.

The gravity drive failed, incapable of withstanding the blow. It must’ve been because of the previous attack.

Mattias had just risen to his feet. So what did that mean? Kathleen could easily tell you what that meant.

Mattias went flying. Right toward her console.

She should’ve just let him hit it.

He deserved it, deserved it and worse.

But something inside her muscles overruled her mind, and it gave her a taste of the same strange sense she’d felt when she’d saved him during the Mercury Nova incident. Back then, she’d had no choice but to rise to Mattias’s defense. Back then, he’d been the difference between the station being destroyed and saving everyone.

Now was different. The station was gone. So why did her fingers act to save him anyway? Why couldn’t she control the urge that pulsed through them, opened them wide, forced her to her feet, and spun her to the side?

She’d never get her answer. It wasn’t like this breakneck situation would slow down long enough to give her one.

She still caught him, still fixed him in a grip that would much prefer to kill him but didn’t know how to begin.

The Zarpac has followed us through, Mattias had a chance to spit.

Then something struck the ship again.

This time it was done playing with them. This time it was the kind of blow designed to rend the ship in half.

The alarms from before had hardly been tame. Now they blared, shrieking like someone who’d just lost their arm.

To be fair, she hadn’t connected to the ship and didn’t know what the damage was yet. Based on the way the alarm rose even higher, the ship was now damaged beyond repair.

If they lost their ship in this universe, wherever they were, it meant that they would never be able to get out of the universe again. The Supreme Guardians required their vessels to be able to punch through multiversal space. Without them—

There was no point in painting that picture. You shouldn’t jump ahead when you can just wait for reality to serve you pain.

And the pain came.

Something blasted in through the viewscreen.

She had a moment to realize it was the tip of a sword.

A sword… that didn’t belong to a Zarpac. It was too large, too energetic, too wildly powerful.

She’d seen that exact blue crackling energy before. For a very brief time, Frost had considered Kathleen to become a mech pilot. Honestly, Kathleen hadn’t wanted the job. She’d been too focused on Mattias. And her old instincts had kicked into gear, telling her that she had to protect the Guardian stations from his monstrosity.

Not Kathleen’s point.

She might not have accepted the position as a mech pilot, but she still knew a lot about the mechs. She’d still studied them. She still recognized, without a shadow of a doubt, that the sword that parted the screen as if all it was doing was slicing up a flaccid blood vessel was a mech sword. And that made no sense.

It couldn’t possibly be the case. Because there were only five mechs in all of the multiverse. They all belonged to the stations. They would never, ever accept anyone but a Guardian as a pilot. Yet out there, just in front of the ship, was a mech doing their enemy’s bidding, anyway.

Mattias had no idea what he was staring at. He clearly thought it was just an attack from a Zarpac.

He also thought everything was over. It was for him but for completely different reasons.

Transport, Kathleen demanded. When she realized that the computer was barely functioning anymore, she grabbed Mattias when he couldn’t move himself, when he didn’t understand the threat.

Ironic. Because that’s what psychics like him were meant to do.

They were there to eliminate threats to the Bureau.

To do that, they needed to predict where those threats would come from. It went far beyond profiling. They assessed people’s emotional states. If they encountered any anger whatsoever, they acted preemptively.

Sometimes they simply handed their targets to the police, and their targets disappeared forever. Other times, they neutered them. What did that mean? That they ensured they’d never have children?

No. They psychically neutered them.

The psychics did irreversible damage to their target’s emotional systems so they could never, ever achieve the same kind of anger they had previously. So they’d be nothing more than automatons for the rest of their lives. Kathleen’s brother had faced the same terrible fate. And right now in her arms was someone who’d handed out such terrible fates, but rather than do anything to him, she twisted, and in the time they had left before the mech could completely destroy the ship, she lurched through the door.

Maybe someone would call her paranoid. What she called herself however was prepared. She’d always been prepared for an attack from Mattias. It just hadn’t come from him. It didn’t mean that the transporters she always had running hot in the equipment room couldn’t serve her now.

She thought of nothing. When she went into modes like this, she didn’t have to. Her mind became streamlined, became a funnel. Not for thoughts, but for action. All she had to do was focus herself forward with this sense that no obstacle could dare get in her way, and she’d achieve the impossible. Even if the impossible was running from a mech.

She still hadn’t come to terms with that; she didn’t need to.

The front of the vessel crumpled.

Then it exploded. And the explosion shot through the cockpit.

A small, flickering structural shield valiantly tried to protect them from the blast. It couldn’t do that forever.

She turned over her shoulder, and she watched it. Watched as destruction rose and crashed toward them, watched as the inevitable peeled its way back from the heart of chaos and thrust itself toward them in a final attack.

Forgive her for becoming poetic. But if there was one destructive force in the entire multiverse that would always make you feel like it was inevitable, it was the mechs. There was nothing like them. Anywhere. And that included in the Higher-Up realms. There were only five mechs across the multiverse. There’d only be five mechs. Because nobody could make them anymore. Nobody even understood them.

And up until this very moment, nobody else could pilot them apart from the Supreme Outer Guardians. The mechs had made a pact. But clearly they’d just changed the terms of that pact, and at the back of Kathleen’s mind, she realized how fundamentally important that was.

She’d just lost her station, her home. But if the mechs had all chosen different masters, the entire multiverse could be ripped through in hours.

Kathleen and Mattias could escape – and they would escape – but it wouldn’t count.

What the hell is happening— Mattias began. That Zarpac shouldn’t have reached us—

What’s happening is I’m going to inadvisably save your life, Lieutenant. Then somewhere down the track, you will make me pay for it.

There was no time for him to swing his gaze over and stare at her. Certainly not with the expression he did.

There was even less time for her to actually judge that expression, to stare at the way that his eyebrows crumpled, his lips spread thin, and this odd energy developed behind his eyes. Was it a psychic attack? God, did she want to tell you it was a psychic attack.

She wanted to tell you that he was so single-mindedly brutal that he would take this opportunity to hurt her. Even though she was the difference between him living and dying, he’d still attack, because that’s all he was good for.

Except he didn’t. Except he just stared at her once.

And nothing – not even the mech making mincemeat of the front of their ship – stopped her from staring back. And neither did it stop her from finally accessing the emergency transporters.

As the ship finally succumbed – as the mech’s sword sliced right past the door to the equipment room and kept going – she had a chance to look into Mattias’s eyes and wait for an attack that never came.

Because we can spend our entire lives waiting for one thing to happen only to realize it won’t.

We can spend our entire lives paused on the brink.

But if we spend our lives with the right kind of people, they will push us back from the brink before we can fall headfirst past it.

As Kathleen’s transport beam manifested, the mech did something to space. Its hand shot toward them.

Mechs could pluck things out of transport beams even though they’d already dematerialized, and this mech went to grab Kathleen, but Mattias got there first. He spun with her, threw out his own hand, did something, and saved her. Right at the last moment. Saved her, even though the real dance had only just begun. Saved her to kill her later. She was sure of it.

But it didn’t change the fact that for now, they survived.

Nobody could survive long in the multiverse as it crumbled under the feet of its new enemy.

Chapter 2

Harvey

He was alive. For now. Let him give you a tip. It doesn’t matter if you can survive for a few moments against a strong enemy. What matters is just how hard they come after you, just how much they want you to fail. And Tatiana wanted him to die.

Make no mistake.

She also had a heck of a lot of power on her side. It was more than Apollo. It was more than those guards kitted out in gear this simple world could never create.

Tatiana suddenly clicked her fingers, and something completely inexplicable occurred.

A surge of energy rose from Apollo’s chest like a set of angel wings.

Then something was fired right at her. Had Apollo lost it? Was he about to kill Tatiana? Of course not.

But he was about to prove that Tatiana still had the upper hand.

Right in front of Harvey’s face, he saw something that was theoretically impossible.

Apollo broke off a small section of his armor. Just a few centimeters, really. It was about the size of someone’s thumb. But in a moment, it resorted right in front of Tatiana’s face, then created a perfect set of armor for her that hugged her form in a thin black-blue, glittering grip.

The armor was mech armor. It was frigging mech armor.

Back in the early days of the mechs, and by that Harvey meant almost a thousand years ago, the Guardians had wondered if something like this was possible.

Mechs could pretty much do what they wanted with their bodies. So why couldn’t they remove parts of their incredible, unstoppable armor and give it to their pilots? Why not? Because it was impossible. Because even if the mechs could do it, they wouldn’t comply with requests. But then clearly Tatiana had come along. And her mech did more than comply with her request.

Her mech stretched its hand out, and it went to grab hold of Rae again.

She was still in Harvey’s arms, her eyes still as wide and bright with fear. With belly-shaking surprise, too. Because she had just accessed her god power. Or something close.

The force that she’d absorbed from that cave still pulsed over her. It was wildly bright.

Harvey suddenly wished he’d paid far more attention to the process of having a Peacekeeper. Because if only he had, maybe he would understand what was going on right now with her. He’d be able to track the ebbs and flows of her newfound power.

He’d be able to predict exactly what she might do next. But that last bit wasn’t hard.

Even though she wasn’t a Supreme Outer Guardian, she’d given herself one remit. To survive. With Harvey.

To do that, they’d have to fight off the mech and Tatiana.

Tatiana said nothing. She came straight at Harvey, though. This was a long way from the holier-than-thou Supreme Outer Guardian who’d completely ignored him previously.

Back in the cave, she’d only had eyes for Rae.

Now even though Tatiana’s face was covered by her mech helmet, that didn’t matter. Harvey just knew that Tatiana was focusing on him.

And for whatever frigging reason, it felt personal.

What did he know about Tatiana? Not much. He’d already shared the facts. They were few and far between.

She was just a single-minded mech pilot. Until she’d gone rogue, she’d just kept quiet and followed orders.

So why was she taking this so personally now?

Tatiana had admitted that at one point, she’d wanted to approach him to join her little mercenary plot here.

She hadn’t. So was she sore about the fact that he was more loyal than she was? No. It simply had to be more personal than that.

The word personal echoed in his head.

It wasn’t like it could do anything, though, wasn’t like it could give him the power he needed. And he desperately, desperately needed power.

Without it, all he was was a sitting duck. Sorry, he wasn’t sitting.

And fortunately for him, he wasn’t alone.

We’ve got to get out of here, Rae spat.

He had no idea how she was going to do that. Then again, he had no idea exactly what her Peacekeeper power could do.

It wasn’t a real Peacekeeper, but he would keep referring to it like it was.

It wasn’t just the light that was similar to the peacekeepers ordinary Guardians had. It was the sense of it. Harvey had already told you that the Peacekeepers were energetic symbionts who’d made a deal with the Supreme Outer Guardians. Though to be fair, they’d made a deal with the Higher-Ups. Which meant it was slightly different. It meant they could never break that deal.

Peacekeepers and Supreme Outer Guardians were in the same boat, fighting for the same thing.

In many ways, they were closer than mechs and their pilots. Because nothing would ever break that connection, and nothing would ever dilute it.

Even though Rae didn’t have a Peacekeeper and Harvey didn’t know what energy she’d absorbed, it didn’t matter.

Her power rose to the fore.

It protected her just as Apollo reached in and attempted to snap her up.

His fingers stretched wide, and Harvey watched as pulses of power blasted over them.

Harvey had seen energy just like that pulse over George’s fingers.

They formed special disrupting charges. What were they there to disrupt? Good question. Cohesion. What cohesion? Molecular bonds? The cohesion between cells? The communication between someone’s nervous system?

Everything.

Think of it as a chaotic blast that would sink into any complex systems and ensure communication and transport through them would no longer work.

So Harvey knew what would happen to Rae. There was only one thing that could happen to her. Yeah, she’d managed to use her Peacekeeper power to brute force her way out of Apollo’s fingers. But this was different. And she’d soon be dead. In seconds.

Rae clearly had no intention of dying today.

Just before the charge could strike her, she figured out how to create a range attack with her power.

She was just as good with it if not better than she’d been with the armor. She had an instinctive control over the force, even though it took Guardians and their Peacekeepers weeks to adjust to one another. And that was on a station where they had support and training.

Rae had possessed this Peacekeeper energy for… what, less than 10 minutes?

There was no time for Harvey to distract himself with the details when the fact of the matter was, arm outstretched and brow covered in sweat, she created a shield that Apollo couldn’t reach through.

But they were forgetting Tatiana now, weren’t they?

And Tatiana had not removed her attention from Harvey.

With a grunt that could divide any planet in two, she reached Harvey.

This was it.

His body bled with that notion. Appropriate, because it was about to bleed out.

As she wrenched Harvey’s shoulder to the side, he waited for the moment she’d rip off his remaining arm.

But Rae clearly had other ideas.

She grabbed Harvey. She looked into his eyes. Deeply into his eyes.

You know what there wasn’t the time to do? That.

It felt like they’d just wandered into the arms of pure chaos. They should quickly wander right out again or die on the way.

Rae would never let that happen. Rae stared into his eyes as if some part of her had always been waiting for this. For what? For him. The opportunity to rise, to make a difference, to grow, to show her god powers.

He should